Aim: Psychosis is associated with significant health and societal costs. Early intervention in psychosis services (EIP) are highly effective in promoting recovery, yet substantial proportions of young people disengage. The current study aimed to develop and evaluate a novel engagement intervention in EIP services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: There are few reliable and feasible quality assurance methods to support scaling up of psychological interventions delivered by non-specialist providers. This paper reports on the phased development and validation of a digitally administered Knowledge of Problem Solving (KOPS) measure to assess competencies associated with a "task-shared" problem-solving intervention for adolescents with diverse mental health problems in India. Phase 1 established key competencies required to deliver the intervention, followed by item generation for a corresponding knowledge-based competency measure that could be administered efficiently through e-learning systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ε4 allele of the apolipoprotein E (APOE4) gene is an established risk factor for Alzheimer's disease but its impact on cognition in healthy adults across the lifespan is unclear. One cognitive domain that is affected early in the course of Alzheimer's disease is spatial cognition, yet the evidence for APOE-related changes in spatial cognition is mixed. In this meta-analysis we assessed the impact of carrying the APOE4 allele on five subdomains of spatial cognition across the lifespan.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlob Ment Health (Camb)
November 2023
We evaluated a digital learning programme for non-specialists to develop knowledge-based competencies in a problem-solving intervention for adolescents to examine the overall impact of training on knowledge-based competencies among learners; and to compare the effects of two training conditions (self-guided digital training with or without coaching) in a nested parallel, two-arm, individually randomised controlled trial. Eligible participants were 18 or older; fluent in Hindi or English; able to access digital training; and had no prior experience of delivering structured psychotherapies. 277 participants were enrolled from 31 March 2022 to 19 June 2022 of which 230 (83%) completed the study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Psychosocial interventions delivered by nonspecialists can be effective at reducing common adolescent mental health problems in low-resource settings. However, there is a lack of evidence on resource-efficient methods for building capacity to deliver these interventions.
Objective: The objective of this study is to evaluate the effects of a digital training (DT) course, delivered in a self-guided format or with coaching, on nonspecialists' competency to deliver a problem-solving intervention intended for adolescents with common mental health problems in India.
Developmental theories suggest affect-biased attention, preferential attention to emotionally salient stimuli, emerges during infancy through coordinating individual differences. Here we examined bidirectional relations between infant affect-biased attention, temperamental negative affect, and maternal anxiety symptoms using a Random Intercepts Cross-Lagged Panel model (RI-CLPM). Infant-mother pairs from Central Pennsylvania and Northern New Jersey ( = 342; 52% White; 50% reported as assigned female at birth) participated when infants were 4, 8, 12, 18 and 24 months of age.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Health care workers experience high stress. Accessible, affordable, and effective approaches to reducing stress are lacking. In-person mindfulness-based interventions can reduce health care worker stress but are not widely available or accessible to busy health care workers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examined patterns of attention toward affective stimuli in a longitudinal sample of typically developing infants (N = 357, 147 females, 50% White, 22% Latinx, 16% African American/Black, 3% Asian, 8% mixed race, 1% not reported) using two eye-tracking tasks that measure vigilance to (rapid detection), engagement with (total looking toward), and disengagement from (latency to looking away) emotional facial configurations. Infants completed each task at 4, 8, 12, 18, and 24 months of age from 2016 to 2020. Multilevel growth models demonstrate that, over the first 2 years of life, infants became faster at detecting and spent more time engaging with angry over neutral faces.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPublication bias poses a challenge for accurately synthesizing research findings using meta-analysis. A number of statistical methods have been developed to combat this problem by adjusting the meta-analytic estimates. Previous studies tended to apply these methods without regard to optimal conditions for each method's performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn attention bias to threat has been linked to psychosocial outcomes across development, including anxiety (Pérez-Edgar, K., Bar-Haim, Y., McDermott, J.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The frequency and severity of mental health problems in student populations have been a growing cause for concern worldwide, and studies have identified measures of a number of mental health symptoms that have been steadily increasing in frequency and intensity over the past 20-25 years.
Methods: In two studies we investigate the levels and domains of pathological worrying in university student participants. Study 1 is a retrospective study of Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) data collected between 2001 and 2019.
Attention processes may play a central role in shaping trajectories of socioemotional development. Individuals who are clinically anxious or have high levels of trait anxiety sometimes show attention biases to threat. There is emerging evidence that young children also demonstrate a link between attention bias to salient stimuli and broad socioemotional profiles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaths attainment is essential for a wide range of outcomes relating to further education, careers, health and the wider economy. Research suggests a significant proportion of adults and adolescents are underachieving in maths within the UK, making this a key area for research. This study investigates the role of children's perceptions of the school climate (children's affect towards school and student-teacher relationships), their attitudes towards maths and teacher characteristics as predictors of maths attainment trajectories, taking the transition from primary to secondary education into consideration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA 'maths crisis' has been identified in the UK, with many adults and adolescents underachieving in maths and numeracy. This poor performance is likely to develop from deficits in maths already present in childhood. Potential predictors of maths attainment trajectories throughout childhood and adolescence relate to the home environment and aspects of parenting including parent-child relationships, parental mental health, school involvement, home teaching, parental education and gendered play at home.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCollecting data with infants is notoriously difficult. As a result, many of our studies consist of small samples, with only a single measure, in a single age group, at a single time point. With renewed calls for greater academic rigor in data collection practices, using multiple outcome measures in infant research is one way to increase rigor, and, at the same time, enable us to more accurately interpret our data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe transition from primary to secondary education is a critical period in early adolescence which is related to increased anxiety and stress, increased prevalence of mental health issues, and decreased maths performance, suggesting it is an important period to investigate maths attainment. Previous research has focused on anxiety and working memory as predictors of maths, without investigating any long-term effects around the education transition. This study examined working memory and internalizing symptoms as predictors of children's maths attainment trajectories (age 7-16) across the transition to secondary education using secondary longitudinal analysis of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe primary- to secondary-education transition is a substantive life event for many children. The transition can be associated with changes in the developmental trajectories of both emotional health and academic achievement. The current study looked at whether the trajectory of mathematical attainment and emotional health (anxiety) across this transition predicted later maths anxiety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople with synaesthesia (e.g., experiencing colours for letters and numbers) have been reported to possess enhanced memory relative to the general population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe discovery that prolonged administration of interferon-alpha (a pro-inflammatory cytokine) readily precipitates depressive symptoms has played a key role in development of the inflammation theory of major depressive disorder (MDD). However, it remains unclear whether the clinical phenotype of patients with inflammation-associated depression significantly overlaps with, or can be distinguished from that of patients with 'idiopathic' depression. Here we explored the Hamilton depression scale factor structure of 172 patients undergoing interferon-alpha treatment for hepatitis-C at the point of transition to a depressive episode of DSM IV defined major depression severity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEveryday life is defined by goal states that are continuously reprioritized based on available, often affective information. To pursue these goals, individuals need to process and maintain goal-relevant information, while ignoring potentially salient information that distracts resources from these goals. Empirically, this ability has typically been operationalized as working memory (WM) capacity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFollowing publication of the original article [1], the authors reported a typing mistake in the spelling of author Iain O'Leary. The original article has been corrected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: At least 40% of people with psychosis have persistent distressing symptoms despite optimal medication treatment. Cognitive behaviour therapy for psychosis (CBTp) is the only NICE-recommended individual therapy for psychosis, with effects on symptoms, distress and quality of life. Yet <10% of service-users receive it and 94% of trusts struggle to provide it.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPregnancy, birth and adjusting to a new baby is a potentially stressful time that can negatively affect the health of women. There is some evidence that expressive writing can have positive effects on psychological and physical health, particularly during stressful periods. The current study aimed to evaluate whether expressive writing would improve women's postpartum health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe transition from primary to secondary education is one of the most stressful events in a young person's life (Zeedyk et al., 2003) and can have a negative impact on psychological well-being and academic achievement. One explanation for these negative impacts is that the transition coincides with early adolescence, a period during which certain psychological disorders (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF